damned_lounge | HMD #5

damned_institute HMD Meme

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Thank you!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi! First off, thank you so much for taking the time to comment. We really want to hear feedback from players, so we're glad you approached us about this.

We've actually had this concern ourselves for awhile and have tried experimenting with different ways to give players more flexibility and more power over some of the setting without compromising the structure of the game. It's a delicate balance. The initial harshness of the military's take-over was directly related to the player-organized riot the day before. Missions, and how they subsequently allow characters to have a little more influence on the setting, were supposed to be a step in that direction. Failed missions can yield a variety of consequences that players are free to opt out of if they choose, while the opportunity for characters to directly change special storylines have also come up (a specific example is the impact Scarecrow and Depth Charge had on the traitor subplot during the military arc).

Of course, some ideas we tried didn't pan out exactly how we'd hoped for a variety of reasons, while we believe other ideas we've come up with can eventually help open up other ways to world-build more later.

I will say that one issue we've had with having more character-driven plots is that sometimes players don't or can't follow through with them for whatever reason, and the storyline stagnates before it can reach its potential. But we still haven't given up on trying to carve new facets of the game for players to explore.

Something we're figuring out is a system that potentially pits other patients against each other in a way that hasn't been done before. We'd also like to finally expand the story in an outward direction in order to flesh out the world itself and open up new features of the game that are unlike anything else we currently have. Hopefully we can get some of these rolling out in the near future.

Also, I realize this doesn't solve the bulk of the issue, but I feel like it's worth noting all the same: if players want to organize things like a massive patient meeting, or distributing maps of explored territory, or trying to make a more concentrated effort to do things, they're more than welcome to do so. We'd love to try accommodating people who want to do more institute-wide things, as the smaller playerbase makes it easier to do so.

Thanks again for commenting. Please let us know if you have anything else to add or any other suggestions.

Hmmm, off handdddd

Is there any chance you can contact players or maybe even do a polling post OOC with anyone who wants to do some kind of long-term plot? Furthermore, what about designing plots that could eventually be transferred to someone else—fail-safes, so to speak? Maybe build in something like that.

That's the first thing that came to mind.

Thanks for the suggestions! We'll likely do OOC posts or polls to try to organize something in the future.

As far as fail-safes go, they sound like a good idea, but with the slower pace of the game, it can be a challenge to design ways to fairly determine whether a player won't/can't follow through with a story, and then to effectively transfer plotlines to other characters without dragging the process out longer than it needs to be. That's partly why in our experiments to involve other characters in major plots (like letting Maya handle the device intended to give everyone their powers back), they've been over a shorter period of time, and a little smaller in scale than what people would probably like to see.

The three of us would like to put up a discussion post in the future in order to gauge interest in some of our current ideas, and see what kinds of things other players might like to do in the future. We'll probably put something like that up in the near future.

Thanks again for your comments! Please let us know if you have anything else to bring up or add.

HMD #5

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD

Re: GAME THREAD